Critique on Virus 6F3

In Virus 6F3 written by Hannah Brown, Ayaha Ikezawa, Jun Hyun Park, Brian Lee and Yuri Nobematsu, they tell a fictional story based on non-fictional characters, conveying deeper underlying messages on how to survive. Every chapter introduced something fresh which made it a nice and engaging read. Their novella presents the protagonists being stuck in a world filled with zombies because of a virus called virus 6F3 created by a character called Ethan Salter. Due to the use of non-fictional characters, it elicits a suspension of disbelief and it also facilitates the imagery of the readers.

Their prologue really hooked the readers, for it instantly started with an alluring question: “Why is it that everyone must have to die in the end?” (Virus 6F3). As I mentioned before, every chapter had a new conflict and an abundance of dialogue, which means they followed the Rule of Thumbs.In every chapter, either a person would die (become a zombie) or get stuck in a life-threatening situation. Although entertaining, the story contained many errors; use of grammar, punctuation errors, build-up of sentences, and a lack of coherence.

The build-up of sentences, and punctuation and grammatical errors caused an inefficiency while reading, for it’s either read incorrectly or difficult to be understood. They mostly used incorrect punctuation while writing dialogue e.g. “ “Damn, that was close.” Brian said.” (Lee, Virus 6F3).Here they used a period instead of a comma when closing a quotation. And simple things like that, even though not really bothersome, does matter. The conjugation of verbs were often incorrect in some parts. They would confuse “he has” with “he have”, “he were” with “he was” , “he ran” with “he runned”, and “he has seen” with “he have sawn”. For example: “the combat was extreme than any other fight Jun have ever sawn” (Ikezawa, Virus 6F3). And for their build-up of sentences, they would order certain phrases incorrectly e.g. “Everything, they did not even know what they were thinking about, just spaced out” (Park, Virus 6F3). Also, their usage of “slowing down time” was occasionally limited, for many relevant parts e.g. the deaths or abandoning of characters and the ending were written in only a few sentences. These errors diminished the fluency, and fluency is incredibly important for it helps the reader to stay engaged and to understand and enjoy the material. Notwithstanding these errors, I enjoyed reading their novella, for I knew the characters and I love stories about apocalypses. Their messages of “never giving up” and “friendship is very important” were conveyed, albeit subtle. Despite this merit, the dearth of eloquence was quite off-putting and vexatious. If only they reviewed or let someone else review their novella for errors, it could’ve been exemplary. Like what Edmund Burke once said: “Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting” (Edmund Burke).